Twitter

Microsoft's Skype has had their Twitter account, Facebook account, and blog of hacked this afternoon by the Syrian Electronic Army. This hacker group appears to have taken the holiday opportunity to lay posts in staff's absence, suggesting their reasoning is to reveal Microsoft's supposed monitoring and selling of email data from Outlook and Hotmail to "the governments."

Recently it came to blindingly bright light that teens don't like Facebook because that's where their moms and dads are. Surprise! Teens don't like their parents knowing what they're up to. But a study released today shows that parents are hot on the trail and expanding their social networking presence to alternative platforms.

Shark attacks, while not terribly frequent when viewed in light of how many people visit the beach every day, are a valid concern for beach-goers and have been increasing in recent years. To give surfers and others an edge over the ocean-bound creatures, researchers tagged 300 or so sharks with transmitters. Similarly situated are receivers for the transmitters under the water that keep an eye on where the sharks are and send out tweets when they get too close.

Earlier this month, Blackberry pushed out an update to the Twitter mobile app for Blackberry 10, bringing it up to version 10.2.2. Along with the new release came some new features, such as the ability to be BBM connected, to reply within tweets, a boost to the search function and more. Unfortunately, the update also brought a variety of bugs with it, and as a result Blackberry has pulled it a little over a week after its release.

Twitter's stock price rose to record levels three times in as many days. It closed today at $69.96, rising 8.4% over yesterday. In turn, the price closed 7.5% higher yesterday than the day before. The social media company's market valuation now stands at nearly $40 billion.

There’s nothing quite like adding a major hand in the current technology scene to your board of directors - and this week, Disney’s done just that. Jack Dorsey, cofounder of both Twitter and Square, has been added to the Disney board of directors this week, suggesting that he’s both honored and humbled to do so: “Disney is a timeless company, one we all grow up learning from and admiring.”

A PR agency that handles CollegeHumor, OkCupid, the Daily Beast, Vimeo and other high-profile web properties has "parted ways with" a corporate communications officer over a tweet deemed offensive by the company and some of the grassroots public. The tweet came from one Justine Sacco's personal account, not a company account. It informed her followers that she was about to fly to Africa, commented on the AIDS epidemic on that continent -- and implied that she thought her being white inoculated her against the deadly disease.

Vine has launched vanity URLs for its new web-profiles, allowing at least some users of the short video sharing service to reserve their own personal addresses. Confirmed as incoming yesterday, registrations for the custom URLs are now being accepted, though you'll need to be an existing Vine user and a Twitter VIP if you want to snag one initially.

Twitter is working on an edit feature. Meaning you could soon be able to edit your tweets -- with some caveats. You won't be able to write a tweet, publish it, wait a few hours, and then replace the content of the tweet with entirely different and unrelated content. Twitter is still working out the details of what you can and can't do in edit mode, but the feature is on the horizon.